Verne, as you and I discussed last night I'm very disenchanted with this board, given the continued problems with the new software and just a general lack of new participants and topics. We used to have a lot of traffic visit the wine board but not at all any more. I really don’t know what the problem is or how to fix it but I find myself participating in other boards rather than here.

I'll try to post some notes tomorrow. I've been drinking mostly whites lately except for a cheese dinner in Raleigh that featured Italian wines. (I'm going meatless two days a week during Lent so have been opening more whites.) I did open a Williams Selyem Pinot over the weekend.

To Thomas & WOW.... Isn't that precious......To Drewski...Hope you find them suckerz as cuter an' cuddly as usns' WW (And as aside to Thomas I DO unnerstan' wha' the daily crapski entails. Not sure I have the cohones to do it)

I know things are not as usual on the Wine Board, but we are working hard to get it to a "better than current" state. It’s a process that takes a lot of programming time and dedication. Please keep posting and if you have any issues email directly to this address. Alternatively you can call me on the cell if there is something specific we need to see. From what I see right now, the following issues are still outstanding:

1. Fixing the ability to allow people to edit/delete their posts
2. Importing the old wine storage threads
3. Getting the smiley faces back

The gang is working hard to iron out the kinks, I know. Once the board is running seamlessly, I think we need to give it more prominence on the Homepage of Wines.com to get people to come in here... I find the link is a little unpredictable. Sometimes it works fine, othertimes no. The main thing though, is getting the board issues resolved, then bring in newcomers, as Alex says. I agree.

BTW, my kidney stone surgery is over! It was one of the worst (as in most painful) experiences of my life. OMG. I would not wish that on my worst enemy. I am just so glad it is over and I'm home again! Good to be among friends here.

Greetings Forum Members!
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1) We’ve been working out the kinks that have caused the “link to be unpredictable” as Jackie mentioned. We believe that situation has stabilized greatly.
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2) Importing the old wine storage threads is a difficult issue. We have to figure out what happened that prevented that data from being extracted in the transition to the new technology behind the new forum. To date, we haven’t had a lot of development time to work on this issue but, it is on the radar. Thanks for your patience!
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On the “search engine” problem: I haven’t heard much about this problem (from the users). PLEASE PROVIDE SPECIFIC EXAMPLES so we can start troubleshooting that issue immediately. We will make moving that a top priority.
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After that we have plans in the next 30 days to attempt to add the following functionality to the Forum:
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1) Ability to edit in HTML
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2) Ability to edit or delete your own posts
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3) Ability to add emoticons
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4) Changing the password reset system to make it easier to create/reset a password
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5) Ability to add a personal signature to a posting
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Immediately after, our plan was to dedicate some major time to restoring the “wine storage” threads database. The wine storage piece is very important to us too - all that rich content helps boost the Wines.com search engine ranking! So from a business perspective, having it offline right now is actually lowering our ranking score because it looks to Google like we’ve lost hundreds of pages of content. We really do want to fix that and all the other issues. Alas, we’re just short on resources and moving as fast as possible under those constraints.
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Thanks to everyone for being patient! We really appreciate everyone’s participation and dedication to the Wineboard Forums and want to make it one of the best forums in cyberspace – that goal will only serve to help Wines.com grow as the web’s best resource online for wine.